Abstract
Which kinds of campaign post draw the most likes, comments and shares? I link a hand-coded dataset of 1,205 Facebook posts from the Labour and Conservative party pages and the pages of David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, published in the month before the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections, to the interactions each post received. I compare posts within the same page, holding constant the format, length and timing of the post and the page's audience. I chose nine features in advance from the literature and from a check of each code against an independent second coder, and I correct for multiple testing. Posts with a negative orientation, criticising or attacking, drew about 20% more interactions than other posts on the same page (95% CI 4% to 39%), and more comments and shares in particular. This is the most robust result: it holds in every check, on seven of the eight pages and in the subset of pages for which the coded sample is close to complete. Humour (60% more) and celebrities (37% more) went with large increases, and posts that showed the page's own leader, asked for the vote or asked people to share went with increases of 14% to 16%, but these associations depend on the Labour and Corbyn pages and on whether the post came from a party or a leader page. Calls to vote and to share went with more engagement on party pages only. Pledges and pictures of members of the public made no detectable difference. In 2017, when Facebook recorded emotional reactions, negative posts and criticism of the opposing leader drew a larger share of angry reactions, and posts showing the leader, pledges and celebrities a larger share of love reactions. Many of the 52 other codes I examine are associated with engagement, but most of those codes were not reliably reproduced by the second coder. The sample comes from Facebook's ranked post limit and is not a census for three of the eight pages, and the design is associational: it describes which content earned engagement, not why.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). What Earns Engagement? Hand-Coded Content and Facebook Interactions on British Party and Leader Pages, 2015 and 2017. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23398394